10/29/08

With their scary uniforms and vehicles that may contain pamphlets with pictures of instruments of wars, it's no wonder that Seattle would want to be isolated from the reality of the modern Department of Defense. This Mom is no exception. From The Stranger:

"[The parks department had] been advertising a teen-appreciation day [with] basketball, swimming, a DJ, and a barbecue," Barker says. She says the woman who alerted her to the recruiters' presence "pulled up with her kids and saw two guys in army fatigues in a black Hummer. She wanted them to go away and they wouldn't." Barker says she's also heard of recruiters showing up to events with climbing walls and video games.

Apparently public property is acceptable for everyone except the military, perhaps because they aren't viewed as the public. Or perhaps because voluntary military service is a burden to over-worried mothers who can't stand to see the sight of military recruiters. Maybe it's time we bring back the draft.

Bonus:Funny letter to the editor regarding this subject. David E. from Tacoma is less than pleased with "commie-hippie" types invading the Puget Sound.

10/27/08

Josh Mandel is the young-looking state rep from Ohio, who has also done two tours in Iraq with the Marine Corps. The number of Iraq/A-stan vets in positions of political power is so small currently, that Fox News once dide a two-and-a-half minute special on him. Trial lawyers and corruption are not unusual for politics, however, so his opponents wife in his district, Barbara Belovich, decided to play up the weirdness of having a military background as opposed to years prosecuting slip and fall accidents. From Townhall:

Of all the factors he weighed, Mr. Mandel says political concerns were not among them. Now he has been forced to deal with the politics of that decision. The opponent in his tough re-election fight, trial attorney Bob Belovich, is attacking Mr. Mandel’s service, arguing that he abandoned voters. Mr. Belovich’s wife, Barbara, acknowledged in an interview for this column that she has told voters that Mr. Mandel “went AWOL” (a military term for desertion) by fighting in Iraq.

Even Mr. Mandel’s motives for serving in Iraq are being questioned. Mrs. Belovich claimed in an interview with this columnist that Mandel “put his personal ambitions ahead of his constituents.” Asked why anyone would enter a war zone out of “personal ambition,” Barbara Belovich replied curtly, “Certainly he wasn’t serving our needs.”

Audio of CHUDs in their backroom dealings are here. Bob Belovich then suggested the only reason he won the 2006 election was because he had a Jewish name. While the election is in doubt, Josh Mandel sure has some real winners running against him.

10/22/08

Matt Welch is a well-respected journalist who currently writes for Reason and the LA Times, and he wrote a highly critical book about McCain before it was cool to do so this election cycle. However, he recently stated that McCain truly is a military hero for suffering during his stay at the Hanoi Hilton. When he made this statement, the flurry of CHUD-related nasty emails in his inbox reached unprecedented levels. From Reason:

Does being a POW make you a war hero? I think not - obviously it is hella-bad times, but that does not in itself make you a "hero." I pray you do not breed or vote...do you feel then that the detainees iwho have been in Guantanamo or rendered ("rendition') to countries more suitable for intense interrogation are heroric and worthy of being considered for the highest office in this land?

Luckily this election will be over in a couple of weeks and hopefully this sort of thing might go by the wayside, but somehow that seems like a too optimistic assessment.

10/20/08

The conspiracy kooks at Lew Rockwell continue to rail against the "fascist" military. This time it has to do with the Blue Angels threatening to conduct bombing runs on the Bay Area. From Lew Rockwell:

To characterize this air show as a form of entertainment is to misjudge its intended purpose. Like the annual May Day military parades conducted by the Soviet government, the objective of this exercise was to remind people of the disproportion of power that the state exercises over them. Should you harbor any sentiments of disobedience to state authority, this is what government officials have at their disposal to bring you back into line. At a time when it became known that a large body of American troops had been returned from Iraq to be deployed in American cities, the presence of such Navy hardware added to the intimidation. President Bush’s threat to members of Congress – as reported by one congressman – to impose martial law should they fail to pass the infamous corporate "bailout" measure, showed the effectiveness of menacing people with violence.

If the purpose of the military was to quash dissenters and malcontents, SF would have been nuked many, many years ago. This conspiracy-mongering schtick is wearing incredibly thin over at Crazy Lew's.

Since hawking lugies on returning Vietnam vets in a fit of self-righteous indignation wasn't enough, some Baby Boomers continue to say nasty things about our Armed Forces. From Aging Hipsters (which Wek has referred implied as the worst blog of all time):

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need more troops for some insane war that makes you poorer and the rich richer, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up eventually, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire.

Insinuations that troops are only from the Red States is hurtful and inaccurate as it seeks to polarize our society. It should also be mentioned that Flower Power wouldn't make a very good defense policy in Nuevo California either, whatever the hell that's supposed to be.

10/16/08

CHUDs look for any excuse they can to wreak havoc against our beloved military. Christopher Columbus, who came to the new world several hundred years before our Armed Forces were formed, provided a convenient excuse to vandalize a recruiting station. From Santa Cruz Indymedia:

On the night after Columbus Day 2008 we vandalized eleven windows at the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Recruiting Center in Santa Cruz County with a paint and acid mix.

The U.S. government has always waged a war of extermination against land-based ways of life in order to impose capitalist exploitation of the earth and its peoples.

For 516 years they and their predecessors have been met with resistance. Neither law enforcement nor the military can ever defeat our struggle.

To the land and all indigenous peoples devestated by the U.S. government: we apologize for leaving this building standing.

Wasn't Columbus Day a school night? Sometimes CHUDs have no respect for their parents who are paying for them to go to college.

On October 9, 2008, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., the Navy’s Blue Death terrorized the over 1 million people in San Francisco with their horrifying noise and deadly, illegal low flights over heavily populated San Francisco wasting tax dollars and oil in their military recruiting show to celebrate Columbus Genocide Weekend, 3 weeks before election day.

These terrorists flights are perpetrated by the same military that carried out the 9/11 Inside Job at the behest of the ruling class and its spokespeople, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Giuliani.

It is wise to remember the South Park episode about 9/11 conspiracies. It was pissed off Muslims, dumbass.

It makes me sick to see tax dollars being p*ssed away for the whole spectrum of disgusting pro-war BS!

I guess I should look on the bright side though. The latest push to con parents into sending their kids off to be cannon fodder for big oil must mean that the kids are getting smarter.

Yippee!

If Chet Dude is seeking to impress the ladies online, he should realize that women often judge a man based on how he treats his mother. On an article designed specifically to appeal to Moms with such a CHUD comment, that would put Chet Dude as likely to attract women as Disco Stu.

10/2/08

Rolling Stone's, Tim Dickinson, writes a terrible, lengthy article about former Naval officer John McCain. Instead of criticizing McCain's campaign platform, he chooses to belittle his time as a P.O.W. and suggests that he was cowardly during the devastating USS Forrestal fire. You know it was coming, and CHUD Busters is a bit surprised that partisan operatives in major media outlets took so long to begin sinking this low in an election year. If only Hunter S. Thompson were still alive, who was once a service member, this type of bullshit wouldn't happen.

10/1/08

Despite significant press releases and news coverage about the heroic National Guard response to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, Green Party presidential candidate, Cynthia McKinney, has chosen to bring the crazy about how she remembered events. Citing the reliable source of a friend's son's recollection, she states that 5000 stiffs with bullet wounds in the head have been processed into some super secret "Pentagon Computer". The bodies were dumped into the swamp, presumably to be delicious snacks for Republican alligators. This may conjure up some creepy New World Order fantasies about shock troops rounding up innocent civilians for owning a copy of Loose Change, but it is simply not true and therefore a lame attempt at a C.H.U.D. attack.

This beautiful place has suddenly become yet another Military Cemetery defiled by the the greedy and the disrespectful. Recently and on three different occassions, vandals, called ‘metal thieves’ by law enforcement, went into the cemetery and stripped the copper gutters, downspouts and roofing from the shelters used during burials. Additionally, brass name plates and metal urns have been stolen.

This is consistent with low-life meth addict behavior of scrounging up some spare metal to sell for a couple of lousy bucks. Unfortunately, disrespect of deceased veterans is no big deal when it's time to tweak out. At least in California, the meth addicts hassle active-duty Marines, who can fight back.